Or forget built in, just set it in front of them and allow for full personalization of what gets hidden. Heck, do you really need to see that window while watching TV?
I admit the dropping down from above thing has appeal though, I do like to avoid clutter down at a more useful height. Something that could be easily mounted to a wall or ceiling perhaps? Or even set on top of a bookshelf?
You sure you're remembering that name correctly? The only thing I can find with that name is the white-out brand, and it would seem a really odd choice to brand your snazzy display technology the same thing as a well established error correcting fluid, even before you consider the nigh-inevitable trademark battle that would result.
Think of things you can do with a wall, that you don't mind being blocked while watching TV.
Pictures? Shelves? Windows? Right now the TV claims exclusive reign over a large chunk of wall space. If it disappeared when off, then you could use that space much more enjoyably.
There's also the issue of the big ugly black rectangle dominating part of the room for no good reason - why would you want that if you could easily make it go away?
I agree that roll-up mobiles have a lot more promise - but they are also a lot more challenging. The technology has to find a market somewhere if it's going to be developed enough to become practical for portables.
For starters, the curvature when rolling something up to fit in your pocket is a LOT tighter, which means much greater stress on the components. If the TV can handle their claimed 50,000 roll-ups on... lets call it a 6" diameter spindle, then it'll probably be a challenge to get the same technology to last even 4,000 roll-ups on a 1/2" diameter spindle for a pocket display. And of course a mobile device is probably going to be rolled up dozens of times per day - so you might be looking at less than 1 year of durability for a pocket device using the same technology that will last 20 years for a TV
And then there's the question of structural support - a TV can be drawn tight by a piston-ish mechanism like they have here. But that doesn't work so well if you want to touch the screen, which you almost certainly do with a portable. In that case you need some sort of rigid backplate to avoid further flexing damage with every touch. And that's a lot of heavily-stressed mechanical components to fold up into nothing.
Personally I think laser-projector/detectors have a lot more promise for portables. Your phone isn't big enough? Let it project a 10-20" touch screen on the table or wall instead. Or in a dark room, back up a bit and let it project an 80" screen to watch a movie.
Hmm, 10x per day for almost 14 years? Yeah, that's probably long enough for other problems to develop first.
I wonder though if rolling accelerates the existing OLED degradation, or if it only degrades in some completely independent way that just has to outlast that. If every roll-up shortened the OLED lifetime by even just several minutes, I might be hesitant to do so too frequently.
Do you never turn off your TV? I'd expect it to roll up automatically when off, and roll back out when turned on. And with good reasons beyond novelty: 1) It protects the screen from accidental damage. 2) it removes that huge ugly black rectangle from your visual space 3) it lets you put your TV anywhere - in front of pictures, a window, shelves, or anything else you don't mind having blocked while watching TV.
All of which become increasingly valuable as TVs get bigger.
>They literally consume the pixel material to emit light.
Umm - no. The organic material degrades with use a lot faster than silicon, but it is not "consumed to emit light". A candle is consumed to emit light. A OLED, like CRT phosphors, just wear out with use. A molecule breaks here, another breaks there, eventually enough are broken that it becomes obvious.
If you could prevent the molecular breakage it would work perfectly, indefinitely. The breakage is not important to the process, unlike in a candle. It's just really hard to eliminate completely.
I like the idea, especially against a wall - the TV could cover pictures, windows, shelves, anything you don't need access to while watching TV. And just getting that big black rectangle out of the room is nice.
What exactly are you expecting to get out of a warranty that's worth 5-10x the cost of the computer? That's have to be a LOT better tech support than I've normally seen. (I'll admit I haven't dealt with Lenovo...)
Think of it this way: Option 1: a computer with a year or three of warranty Option 2: Ten computers
Even a minimum wage employee in the EU is probably costing you around $20,000/year just in salary. If $500 (2.5% of salary) in additional equipment makes them 3% more productive, then you're getting a bargain, even before you consider the long term effects of morale, and the fact that you don't need to buy that equipment again every year.
Have their been any realistic attempts to model a brain? Last I heard, the most sophisticated neural structure modeled was something like part of a rat's motor cortex, and the results were very promising
Lets be clear that neural networks are not even remotely close to modeling a brain - even if you created one from a full connectome mapping of a human brain (which last I heard we weren't anywhere close to creating) you'd be modeling a network of dozens (hundreds?) of wildly different types of massively complex, asychronous neurons as a network incredibly simple synchronous identical fuzzy logic gates. If you got anything remotely resembling a human mind out of such a gross oversimplification it would be a miracle.
Composting kills most of the pathogens, you've dumped them the soil microbes optimal, much-hotter turf, and they just can't compete. Some pathogens are especially hardy, but the vast majority die pretty quickly outside the human body, even without a thriving community of soil microbes trying to eat them.
You might still want to avoid growing food in it, just to be extra safe. But so long as you properly compost it first even human manure is really unlikely to cause any problems (properly being the key term). You just don't want to scatter it fresh into your garden like you might other types of manure, since the pathogens will linger a lot longer that way.
It ended a long time before that, with the popularization of embalming, long-lasting caskets, and burial vaults. We do everything we can to make sure that our dead *don't* return to the Earth.
Having the corpse on display in your family room for a week or two was common practice for a very long time, and there was no medical reason to stop - it was just a cultural shift.
Proper composting pretty much eliminates the toxins and infection risk, which are products of the way in which a body decomposes. The composting microbes quickly devour the corpse leaving nothing for any human pathogens to survive in. In fact, they mostly devour the struggling human pathogens as well - microbial warfare happens on a very fast scale, and once the body breaks down the composting microbes have a substantial home-turf advantage. Among other things, a composting bin can easily reach 120-170 degrees (F), much hotter than most human pathogens have evolved to survive.
And you could always heat-sterilize it at the end of the process, if you were especially paranoid.
There is wisdom in not "completing the circle" as you put it - just because nothing is reliably 100% effective - but that's easy to do: just don't grow vegetables in grandma's compost.Even fruit trees are probably fine.
Pretty much every funeral process is already rooted in superstition, I don't see how extending that further is necessarily a bad thing.
And we could avoid the uprooted remains issue if we stuck with the composting - just pour all of the grandma's compost together into the same "grave/garden plot", with her sapling planted in the center.
Of course, not all saplings would survive, but maybe not all the deceased feel the need for a prominent memorial. Or maybe they just didn't like your choice of tree. Pick a story.
No I didn't. If shelter were necessary to survival, no place on Earth would have a homelessness problem. You can survive an Alaskan winter with little more than a jumbo trash bag and a well-chosen bush for shelter.
Everything beyond a few glasses of water and ~1000 calories a day is a WANT. Actually, even those meager resources are a WANT. You don't NEED to survive, it's just a preference.
If you want intuitive and practical why not go back a little further? A hand is more practical for most things than either an inch or a foot, and actually maps more gracefully to metric than its own system: 1 hand = 4 inches = 1/3 foot =~ 10cm
I also prefer cm to inches for the same reason you like Farenheit for temperature: A half an inch difference is noticeable (visually & functionally) in most contexts, which means a whole lot of inch measurements need to be fractional, while you can usually design things to nice clean multiples of 1cm without significant compromise. (and can easily use mm instead, if greater precision is needed)
Lengths are a whole separate issue - you can buy decimal-inch rulers, just like you can buy fractional-centimeter rulers. It's just that they're more difficult to find than "normal" versions.
Fractional rulers are very useful when building things by hand, where you very often end up wanting to divide lengths in half. It does however make both calculations and comparison of different sub-unit lengths more difficult. But most people these days don't build things, at least not often enough to learn how to use a fractional ruler well. But we keep fractional-inch rulers, because that's the way most people have done it (also, subdividing a decimal ruler to be easy to read is a challenge)
1 AU is roughly 389x the distance to the Moon. 3,735x the circumference of the Earth. Or about 31 million times the distance to the horizon when standing at sea level.
In other words, so much larger than anything you have any frame of reference to, that you have no possibility of truly understanding it in those terms - the human brain starts having real problems accurately visualizing even a 1000x difference in scale, most people have trouble with even 100x.
If you want to visualize anything in astronomy, you need to develop a completely different frame of reference to do so. And the distance to the sun is one of the most natural (and thus, intuitive) reference frames for us to use to visualize distances in the solar system.
As someone once said - "The nipple is the only truly intuitive user interface, everything else is learned". By the same token any "intuitive" tool for thought must actually be learned - "inuitive" just means that it's as relevant as possible to your realm of experience. For distances in space, the distance to our sun is the only such thing on remotely the right scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Or forget built in, just set it in front of them and allow for full personalization of what gets hidden. Heck, do you really need to see that window while watching TV?
I admit the dropping down from above thing has appeal though, I do like to avoid clutter down at a more useful height. Something that could be easily mounted to a wall or ceiling perhaps? Or even set on top of a bookshelf?
You sure you're remembering that name correctly? The only thing I can find with that name is the white-out brand, and it would seem a really odd choice to brand your snazzy display technology the same thing as a well established error correcting fluid, even before you consider the nigh-inevitable trademark battle that would result.
Think of things you can do with a wall, that you don't mind being blocked while watching TV.
Pictures? Shelves? Windows? Right now the TV claims exclusive reign over a large chunk of wall space. If it disappeared when off, then you could use that space much more enjoyably.
There's also the issue of the big ugly black rectangle dominating part of the room for no good reason - why would you want that if you could easily make it go away?
I agree that roll-up mobiles have a lot more promise - but they are also a lot more challenging. The technology has to find a market somewhere if it's going to be developed enough to become practical for portables.
For starters, the curvature when rolling something up to fit in your pocket is a LOT tighter, which means much greater stress on the components. If the TV can handle their claimed 50,000 roll-ups on... lets call it a 6" diameter spindle, then it'll probably be a challenge to get the same technology to last even 4,000 roll-ups on a 1/2" diameter spindle for a pocket display. And of course a mobile device is probably going to be rolled up dozens of times per day - so you might be looking at less than 1 year of durability for a pocket device using the same technology that will last 20 years for a TV
And then there's the question of structural support - a TV can be drawn tight by a piston-ish mechanism like they have here. But that doesn't work so well if you want to touch the screen, which you almost certainly do with a portable. In that case you need some sort of rigid backplate to avoid further flexing damage with every touch. And that's a lot of heavily-stressed mechanical components to fold up into nothing.
Personally I think laser-projector/detectors have a lot more promise for portables. Your phone isn't big enough? Let it project a 10-20" touch screen on the table or wall instead. Or in a dark room, back up a bit and let it project an 80" screen to watch a movie.
Hmm, 10x per day for almost 14 years? Yeah, that's probably long enough for other problems to develop first.
I wonder though if rolling accelerates the existing OLED degradation, or if it only degrades in some completely independent way that just has to outlast that. If every roll-up shortened the OLED lifetime by even just several minutes, I might be hesitant to do so too frequently.
Do you never turn off your TV? I'd expect it to roll up automatically when off, and roll back out when turned on. And with good reasons beyond novelty:
1) It protects the screen from accidental damage.
2) it removes that huge ugly black rectangle from your visual space
3) it lets you put your TV anywhere - in front of pictures, a window, shelves, or anything else you don't mind having blocked while watching TV.
All of which become increasingly valuable as TVs get bigger.
>They literally consume the pixel material to emit light.
Umm - no. The organic material degrades with use a lot faster than silicon, but it is not "consumed to emit light". A candle is consumed to emit light. A OLED, like CRT phosphors, just wear out with use. A molecule breaks here, another breaks there, eventually enough are broken that it becomes obvious.
If you could prevent the molecular breakage it would work perfectly, indefinitely. The breakage is not important to the process, unlike in a candle. It's just really hard to eliminate completely.
I like the idea, especially against a wall - the TV could cover pictures, windows, shelves, anything you don't need access to while watching TV. And just getting that big black rectangle out of the room is nice.
What exactly are you expecting to get out of a warranty that's worth 5-10x the cost of the computer? That's have to be a LOT better tech support than I've normally seen. (I'll admit I haven't dealt with Lenovo...)
Think of it this way:
Option 1: a computer with a year or three of warranty
Option 2: Ten computers
Even a minimum wage employee in the EU is probably costing you around $20,000/year just in salary. If $500 (2.5% of salary) in additional equipment makes them 3% more productive, then you're getting a bargain, even before you consider the long term effects of morale, and the fact that you don't need to buy that equipment again every year.
Except that 60 million is the few, are they not? Not even 20% of the population...
Have their been any realistic attempts to model a brain? Last I heard, the most sophisticated neural structure modeled was something like part of a rat's motor cortex, and the results were very promising
Lets be clear that neural networks are not even remotely close to modeling a brain - even if you created one from a full connectome mapping of a human brain (which last I heard we weren't anywhere close to creating) you'd be modeling a network of dozens (hundreds?) of wildly different types of massively complex, asychronous neurons as a network incredibly simple synchronous identical fuzzy logic gates. If you got anything remotely resembling a human mind out of such a gross oversimplification it would be a miracle.
Absolutely. But if I'm going to be planting a garden in 4 weeks, I'd prefer that the body be efficiently composted.
Do they *only* reach out in that direction? Or is it only the vines that manage to find something to grab on to that thrive?
Composting kills most of the pathogens, you've dumped them the soil microbes optimal, much-hotter turf, and they just can't compete. Some pathogens are especially hardy, but the vast majority die pretty quickly outside the human body, even without a thriving community of soil microbes trying to eat them.
You might still want to avoid growing food in it, just to be extra safe. But so long as you properly compost it first even human manure is really unlikely to cause any problems (properly being the key term). You just don't want to scatter it fresh into your garden like you might other types of manure, since the pathogens will linger a lot longer that way.
It ended a long time before that, with the popularization of embalming, long-lasting caskets, and burial vaults. We do everything we can to make sure that our dead *don't* return to the Earth.
Having the corpse on display in your family room for a week or two was common practice for a very long time, and there was no medical reason to stop - it was just a cultural shift.
Proper composting pretty much eliminates the toxins and infection risk, which are products of the way in which a body decomposes. The composting microbes quickly devour the corpse leaving nothing for any human pathogens to survive in. In fact, they mostly devour the struggling human pathogens as well - microbial warfare happens on a very fast scale, and once the body breaks down the composting microbes have a substantial home-turf advantage. Among other things, a composting bin can easily reach 120-170 degrees (F), much hotter than most human pathogens have evolved to survive.
And you could always heat-sterilize it at the end of the process, if you were especially paranoid.
There is wisdom in not "completing the circle" as you put it - just because nothing is reliably 100% effective - but that's easy to do: just don't grow vegetables in grandma's compost.Even fruit trees are probably fine.
Pretty much every funeral process is already rooted in superstition, I don't see how extending that further is necessarily a bad thing.
And we could avoid the uprooted remains issue if we stuck with the composting - just pour all of the grandma's compost together into the same "grave/garden plot", with her sapling planted in the center.
Of course, not all saplings would survive, but maybe not all the deceased feel the need for a prominent memorial. Or maybe they just didn't like your choice of tree. Pick a story.
They do if they're properly composted.
There's a huge difference between composting and just throwing stuff in a pile to rot as it likes.
Exactly. "Need" is entirely context dependent.
No I didn't. If shelter were necessary to survival, no place on Earth would have a homelessness problem. You can survive an Alaskan winter with little more than a jumbo trash bag and a well-chosen bush for shelter.
Everything beyond a few glasses of water and ~1000 calories a day is a WANT. Actually, even those meager resources are a WANT. You don't NEED to survive, it's just a preference.
If you want intuitive and practical why not go back a little further? A hand is more practical for most things than either an inch or a foot, and actually maps more gracefully to metric than its own system: 1 hand = 4 inches = 1/3 foot =~ 10cm
I also prefer cm to inches for the same reason you like Farenheit for temperature: A half an inch difference is noticeable (visually & functionally) in most contexts, which means a whole lot of inch measurements need to be fractional, while you can usually design things to nice clean multiples of 1cm without significant compromise. (and can easily use mm instead, if greater precision is needed)
Lengths are a whole separate issue - you can buy decimal-inch rulers, just like you can buy fractional-centimeter rulers. It's just that they're more difficult to find than "normal" versions.
Fractional rulers are very useful when building things by hand, where you very often end up wanting to divide lengths in half. It does however make both calculations and comparison of different sub-unit lengths more difficult. But most people these days don't build things, at least not often enough to learn how to use a fractional ruler well. But we keep fractional-inch rulers, because that's the way most people have done it (also, subdividing a decimal ruler to be easy to read is a challenge)
1 AU is roughly 389x the distance to the Moon. 3,735x the circumference of the Earth. Or about 31 million times the distance to the horizon when standing at sea level.
In other words, so much larger than anything you have any frame of reference to, that you have no possibility of truly understanding it in those terms - the human brain starts having real problems accurately visualizing even a 1000x difference in scale, most people have trouble with even 100x.
If you want to visualize anything in astronomy, you need to develop a completely different frame of reference to do so. And the distance to the sun is one of the most natural (and thus, intuitive) reference frames for us to use to visualize distances in the solar system.
As someone once said - "The nipple is the only truly intuitive user interface, everything else is learned". By the same token any "intuitive" tool for thought must actually be learned - "inuitive" just means that it's as relevant as possible to your realm of experience. For distances in space, the distance to our sun is the only such thing on remotely the right scale.
A chance to personally beat SCO? I'd buy that!